A cross-chain trading platform NEAR Intents suffered a security exploit on Thursday, losing approximately $3.8 million after a flaw in its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted improperly with the NEAR Intents smart contract.
The team paused core services shortly after detecting the incident and froze deposits and withdrawals across eleven blockchain networks: BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, Optimism, Avalanche, Stellar, TON, Monad, X Layer, ADI, Scroll, and Plasma. The contract vulnerability has been patched, and core services were expected to resume around an hour after the announcement, though deposit and withdrawal functions on the affected networks faced a longer delay.
NEAR Intents said it will fully reimburse affected users, is working with blockchain analytics firms, and has reported the incident to law enforcement. A detailed post-mortem is expected in the coming days.
On-chain investigator ZachXBT said the exploit began with unusual withdrawals from a BNB Chain hot wallet linked to NEAR Intents. The stolen funds were sent to crypto exchange KuCoin and later bridged into bitcoin, according to his Telegram update. KuCoin had not responded to a request for comment at the time of reporting.
NEAR Intents has processed more than $30 billion in cumulative volume across 35 blockchains and had announced roughly six weeks earlier that it surpassed $25 billion in lifetime trading volume. The native NEAR token fell about 6% to 6.7% over the 24 hours after the exploit, trading near $4.96. The newly launched Bitwise NEAR exchange-traded fund, which began trading just two days earlier, dropped about 6.4% and erased its prior day’s gains.
The incident adds to a difficult year for crypto security, following a separate exploit at Bitget last week that resulted in over $350 million in stolen assets. Other major 2026 losses tracked by DefiLlama include Liquid Network at about $320 million, Drift at $295 million, and Kelp at $293 million.
